No. No it's not. Making a functional UI in visual basic is childs play compared to the absolute cesspit of NIH and feature treadmill that frontend web development has become.
You are gatekeeping with strawmen.
However, it's certainly an order of magnitude more complex to use react with all the features expected of modern development with design systems, auth/z, logging, monitoring, etc.
I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. With a ton of extra power on the compute side, parts of the machine have gotten attainable. But nothing about the process is easier along the way.
I want to, but I just can't back any claim that
things have gotten easier for pretty much anything.
But everything else is harder.
I have zero idea how to tell a new developer to get started in the hobby/industry these days.
The real problem IMO is the absolute churning shitstorm that is front-end development. I don't know how it got so bad, so quickly, and stayed that way for so long. We as an industry are not going to be happy until it takes at least 50 toolchain steps to produce a simple "hello world."
To that end, I suspect telling people to just stand up a node server is where to start hobbyists off? Still very complicated with the division between front and backend that is difficult to see for new folks.
And I fully agree on the ridiculous churn. Having zero stability in documentation and how to do things has been terrible for our industry. What we have gained in better ways seems to mostly be lost in all of the previous ways that used to work.
My point was not that modern deployment is easy. Nor that modern react with all the trimmings is easy. My point was that the nostalgic view of VB is reductive and skips all the things we now consider essentials. And for the effort involved, we get much more done now than ever before, albeit at a much greater complexity cost and steeper learning curve.
Dreamweaver was surprisingly close for building a form or similar. We tossed a lot out the window when we decided to focus on the HTML side of that equation. I swear it is like a lot of the older assembly versus C that existed years ago. Only, we decided that we did, in fact, care about the assembly.
Web tech, even in its early forms, was much more obvious to me and I could run code in the browser's web console. I could find JS snippets online, paste them into index.html, and open the page. I found VB/Access far more confusing than that.
These days I help beginners pick up web dev and I think HNers overestimate (if not circlejerk over) how hard it is just because create-react-app does a lot of things. Client development always had a bunch of specific knowledge you had to learn, and the fat stack of supporting software you generally use (IDEs, Xcode, node_modules, SDK APIs, browser APIs, etc) was always a behemoth.
Were there complications? Of course there were. Would I recommend some of those practices to build something? Not necessarily. But I can't get behind any claims that we made any progress on making things easier for hobby programs.
Closest we have to that, would be the scratch programs my kids have been making.
Hilariously, the best thing for making games and similar ideas that my kids would have, is going to be Mario Maker. By a long shot.
Love the image. "Hey you! No visual aids go into this town! One more step, and my strawmen will React!" But the accountant with the abacus continued towards the east gate. He squeezed between two strawmen, who didn't React as much as the gatekeeper was implying.
Not sure, but I think VB is still responsible for most of MS’s security threats even now. It makes sense for MS to try to EOL
But, that's the only way I used VB6 - for internal software.